Katharine Fullerton Gerould Quotes
The real drawback to the simple life is that it is not simple. If you are living it, you positively can do nothing else. There is not time.
Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life.
Educational legislation nowadays is largely in the hands of illiterate people, and the illiterate will take good care that their illiteracy is not made a reproach on them.
There is no morality by instinct. There is no social salvation in the end without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experience.
Ignorance of what real learning is, and a consequent suspicion of it; materialism, and a consequent intellectual laxity, both of these have done destructive work in the colleges.
Nothing makes people so worthy of compliments as receiving them. One is more delightful for being told one is delightful-just as one is more angry for being told one is angry.
Social distinctions concern themselves ultimately with whom you may and may not marry.
I have looked warily at anthropologists ever since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the Iliad, and listened for an hour to talk about bull-roarers and leopard-societies.
Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism.
Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.
I nearly always find, when I ask a vegetarian if he is a socialist, or a socialist if he is a vegetarian, that the answer is in the affirmative.
Funny how people despise platitudes, when they are usually the truest thing going. A thing has to be pretty true before it gets to be a platitude.
One of the reasons, surely, why women have been credited with less perfect veracity than men is that the burden of conventional falsehood falls chiefly on them.
Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us.
No fashion has ever been created expressly for the lean purse or for the fat woman: the dressmaker's ideal is the thin millionaires.
When did the word 'temperament' come into fashion with us? Perhaps it came in when we discovered that artists were human beings.
The principle of fashion is . . . the principle of the kaleidoscope. A new year can only bring us a new combination of the same elements; and about once in so often we go back and begin again.
Individual freedom and individual equality cannot co-exist. I dare say no one since Thomas Jefferson has really believed it.
... if we have a dollar to spend on some wild excess, we shall spend it on a book, not on asparagus out of season.
Some of the men and women who will not say in so many words the thing which is not, will deliberately give a false impression. They are not the servants of truth; they are the parasites of truth.
democracy always makes for materialism, because the only kind of equality that you can guarantee to a whole people is, broadly speaking, physical.
Society, by insisting on conventions, has merely insisted on certain convenient signs by which we may know that a man is considering, in daily life, the comfort of other people.
The only glory most of us have to hope for is the glory of being normal.
... it is a great mistake to confuse conventionality with simplicity ... it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many inhibitions to follow a social code.
The insidiousness of science lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method.
Frenchwomen could not dress like Englishwomen without conviction of sin.
The very notion of tabu is one of the rightest notions in the world. Better any old tabu than none, for a man cannot be said to be"on the side of the stars" at all, unless he makes refusals.
Many of us do not believe in capital punishment, because thus society takes from a man what society cannot give.
There are only three things worthwhile -- fighting, drinking, and making love.
On the whole, I should say that the person who likes to lie should never, in any circumstances, be allowed to. Leave the lying to the people who hate it. You will not find them indulging often.
if you are perfectly willing to shock an individual verbally, the next thing you will be doing is to shock him practically.
I know exaggerators of both kinds: people whose lies are only picturesque adjectives, and people whose picturesque adjectives are only lies.
It is not permissible to lie merely to save one's face. But it is sometimes permissible to lie to save another person's face.
Do you see any majority, anywhere, in this imperfect and irreligious world, admitting that the minority is precious? That any minority is precious?
What passes for an original opinion is, generally, merely an original phrase. Old lamps for new - yes; but it is always the same oil in the lamp.
For never doubt that those souls who live least by the flesh feel themselves most defiled by its defilement.
When the temperamental and unconventional people are not mere plagiarists of dead eccentrics, they lack, in almost every case, thehistoric sense.